Halle was first mentioned on May 9, 1246, when Bishop Engelbert of Osnabrück swapped his church 'tor Halle' on the southern edge of his diocese for the church at Rheda owned by the Benedictine Abbey Iburg. The most common explanation for the town's name - hal, meaning salt - has the advantage of being plausible and the disadvantage of being unprovable. The two villages that flank Halle on east and west, Oldendorf and Gartnisch, are older still, mentioned in the 11th century. By 1556, when the Ravensberg rent-roll was compiled, the place still had only 49 listed names. The town received Prussian municipal rights from King Frederick William I on April 17, 1719, and spent the next two centuries as the modest capital of its own small district - until 1973, when administrative reorganization made Gütersloh the new district capital and Halle lost its 'HW' license plate code along with its administrative seniority.

Every June, Halle stages one of only a handful of ATP grass-court tournaments in the world - the Halle Open, played at the Gerry Weber Stadion (now the OWL Arena), which Gerry Weber the fashion brand built in 1992–93 because its founder wanted a world-class facility in his hometown. Tennis professionals use the week to retrain their footwork from clay onto grass before Wimbledon begins. Roger Federer made Halle his ritual Wimbledon warm-up starting in 2003, winning the title ten times over his career. The 2007 World Men's Handball Championship used the same stadium for several matches. The local team TC Blau-Weiß Halle won the German Team Tennis Championships in 1995 and 2006. None of this is what you'd expect from a town this size; in Halle, it is simply what happens every June.

The Heart of Halle is its tree-lined church square, where the Protestant parish church - originally a 13th-century single-nave building with a 15th-century square choir and a 19th-century northern addition - is surrounded by half-timbered houses, the oldest dated dendrochronologically to 1512. Kirchplatz No. 11 has a storefront carved with fan rosettes that survived the demolition of the building it originally belonged to. Outside town, in the Tatenhausen Forest, sits the moated castle Tatenhausen - ancestral home of the barons and counts von Korff genannt Schmising, built in Weser Renaissance style starting in 1540 on 14th-century foundations, with a Baroque orangery designed by the great Münster architect Johann Conrad Schlaun in 1751. The castle is still inhabited. The surrounding lake is fed by the Laibach creek, whose waters are also home to one of Germany's only known populations of the great capricorn beetle.

In February, Halle stages the Haller Bachtage - a week of choir, orchestra, chamber and organ concerts that has drawn international names like Peter Schreier, Thomas Quasthoff and Petr Eben to a town that should be too small to attract them. On the wooded slopes above town stands the Kaffeemühle, the 'Burr Mill' - a building put up by the Hagedorn family, Bremen merchants who worked in Halle, given to the town in 1904 by the Kisker distilling family. The public named it after the coffee-mill it resembles. From its perch in the Teutoburg Forest, the views stretch south over the town and the County of Ravensberg, of which Halle was a part for centuries. Walther von der Vogelweide never visited the region. That didn't stop the Ravensberg Men's Choral Society from putting up a memorial to him in 1930 on Vogelweide's 700th deathday - a gesture of cultural attachment that strikes outsiders as eccentric and Westphalians as exactly the kind of thing you do on a hillside in June.